Nowadays, many computer systems are shipped to customers with inactive components provisioned therein. As the term is employed herein, an inactive component is a software or hardware component that the user has not paid for and is not entitled to use as a matter of right. Vendors include inactive components in a computer system for many reasons. For example, a vendor may anticipate that a particular user may need additional software and/or hardware capability in the future and may wish to include the additional capability in an inactive form so that the additional capability can be quickly enabled at a later date if needed.
ICOD (Instant Capacity On Demand) systems are computer systems that typically include one or more inactive components (known as ICOD components) when shipped to the user. The ICOD components may be processors, additional memory, additional cells, or the like. These ICOD components are inactive during normal use and can be activated when the user wishes to obtain additional capability from the ICOD system.
Generally speaking, when an ICOD system is shipped to a user, either the vendor or the customer will deactivate the inactive components so that only the components that have been paid for will be active during use. This deactivation may happen one time prior to shipping, or the ICOD system may include software to automatically deactivate the inactive components upon system booting based on licensing data stored in the ICOD system itself.
Vendors of ICOD systems are generally concerned with two issues: compliance and responsiveness to legitimate activation requests. Vendors are interested in ensuring that ICOD systems stay in compliance because if a user can utilize the additional capability without paying, there is no incentive to purchase the additional capability. Vendors are also interested in being responsive to legitimate activation requests of inactive components since such responsiveness improves customer service and facilitates the sale and/or license of components, which increases revenue to the vendor.
Some vendors rely on the user's honesty, preferring to depend on the user to voluntarily pay for the use of the inactive components when the user activates additional components in the ICOD system. Under the honor system, many users do indeed voluntarily report and pay when an inactive component is activated in order to legitimately acquire the use of the additional components. Other users, however, either through ignorance or by willful action, simply disregard the obligation to pay when activating a previously inactive component.
To ensure compliance, vendors in the past employ an inventory agent, e.g., codes in the ICOD system, to periodically take inventory of the inactive components and compare the number of inactive components with the licensing data stored in non-volatile memory. The data regarding the number of inactive components, along with other identification information such as the serial number of the computer system, the host name, the IP address, and the like may then be sent in an email to the vendor to allow the vendor to audit for compliance.
If a user's system is found to be in a non-compliant state, the vendor may undertake any number of corrective actions. For example, the vendor may wish to send a sales representative to the user whose system is found to be in a non-compliant state in order to suggest the licensing of the activated components. As another example, the vendor may notify the user of the non-compliant status and request that the buyer either immediately pay for the use of the inactive components, or to cease the non-compliant use.
However, it has been found that many users are reluctant to endow their production computer systems with an email infrastructure, and to risk exposing the computer system to the security risks that accompany email access. For some users, even the exposure of the host name to the outside world is unacceptable. For these users, the vendor has no recourse but to rely on the honesty of the user and perhaps costly surprise personal audits in order to ensure that their ICOD system stays in compliance.
Some vendors specify that an additional component may be turned on only after the user has paid for the additional component and obtains a specific codeword from the vendor to activate the additional component. While this method is highly secure, many users find it unacceptable to suffer through the delay of working their way through the bureaucracy at the user's organization to obtain authorization for the purchase and at the vendor's organization to obtain the codeword before the inactive components can be activated. In many cases, unforeseen circumstances may require the user to rapidly turn on certain inactive components to meet a sudden demand. If the vendor cannot offer the user the capability to rapidly activate inactive components, that vendor will be at a competitive disadvantage, especially if other vendors are willing to offer such rapid activation capability to the user.